Provenance:
Lady Eleanor Butler & the Hon. Miss Sarah Ponsonby, for the Gothic Library at Plas Newydd;
Offered for sale by George Robins Auctioneer, London, 13 - 20 June 1832, lot 16 (unsold); 
Sold from Plas Newydd, June 1918;
Acquired from the above by J.H. Duveen on behalf of James Bellhouse Gaskell (1848 -1925) Thence by descent to
William Rawstone Gaskell, later to his wife Florence Melland, and by descent to her granddaughter, Deborah Rettie

Together with
Richard James Lane (1800-1872) After a drawing by Lady Leighton; Proof copy of the Ladies of Llangollen: The Rt Hon Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby, lithograph, lettered below image with title, facsimile of sitter's autographs with their dates of death, 29 x 22cm (11¼ x 8½in.); and a coloured lithograph of the same subject by J.H. Lynch

Provenance:
Purchased at the sale at Plas Newydd, for Lord Duveen, 1918

These Gothic armchairs were in the collection of the renowned Ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and the Hon. Miss Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831), in the Gothic library at Plas Newydd, Llangollen, in the 2nd quarter of the 19th century.

 They are illustrated in a lithograph dated circa 1836 by Richard James Lane (1799–1872), which was based on a watercolour by Lady Mary Leighton (née Parker), composed from clandestine sketches taken from life during a visit in 1828 (see Parker Leighton, `The Ladies of Llangollen’ Country Life, 26 September 141, p. 591). The lithograph depicts Butler and Ponsonby seated in a virtually identical pair of chairs at a table with their cat.  While the acorn finials and caned backs are recognisable, there is evidently some artistic license in the rendition, for example, the arms, which in the lithograph are not padded.

In the 1832 sale of the contents of Plas Newydd, conducted by Charles Robbins, the chairs, which are listed in the library, were offered as lot 15 ‘two black chairs gothic pattern, cane bottoms’ but were apparently unsold. However, in 1884, they are not listed in the house as they do not appear in General Yorke’s Plas Newydd: As it was and As it is, A Catalogue of the Contents published that year. From 1832-1918, there were six changes of ownership at Plas Newydd; it is possible the chairs remained a part of the ‘fittings’ of the house and sold with the house.

 They can next be firmly identified in the 1918 house sale, conducted by Brown & Brown, in the library, lot 1322: ‘FINE OLD PAIR OF ARMCHAIRS, of Chippendale Gothic Design, with cane panelled square backs surmounted by an open rail and carved finials, the arm rests terminating in hexagonal fluted pillars, resting on casters, and fitted with loose hair seats in brown Morocco leather. (The chairs in which the Ladies of Llangollen were portrayed in the popular lithograph)’.

Lady Eleanor Butler and The Hon. Miss Sarah Ponsonby

Hailing from prominent Anglo-Irish families, Lady Eleanor Butler, the daughter of the 16th Duke of Ormonde, and the Hon. Miss Sarah Ponsonby, an orphan raised by her first cousin, Lady Betty Fownes and her husband, Sir William, a member of the Irish Parliament, grew up fifteen miles apart, respectively in Kilkenny Castle and a mansion in Woodstock. Though their backgrounds were rather different, both were clever and bookish, united by a love of French philosophy and novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall. They met when Lady Betty asked her close friend, Eleanor Morres Butler, to keep a ‘watchful eye’ on her thirteen-year-old daughter when she started boarding at Miss Parke’s School. The task was delegated to Mrs. Butler’s daughter, Eleanor, who was 16 years older, and within months the latter became the younger girl’s mentor, confidante, and friend, corresponding incessantly and hatching plans to one day run away together. In 1778, these plans came to fruition on a second attempt when the two families reluctantly accepted the ladies’ decision to be together. Accompanied by one of the Butler housemaids, Mary Carryll, they sailed from Ireland to Milford Haven, and from there journeyed north, eventually arriving in the picturesque Vale of Llangollen, which Ponsonby described as ‘a pretty village on the river Dee… in the Beautifullest Country in the World’. They purchased a simple stone cottage on a hillside overlooking the town, which they renamed Plas Newydd (New Hall); the cottage remained their home for the next fifty years where they spent their days walking, reading, discussing poetry, gardening, sketching, and writing letters.

Contemporaries admired Butler and Ponsonby’s quaint, rural way of life and their decision to enjoy a life of quiet country retirement. Prints of their house and garden were in demand throughout society; Queen Charlotte requested to see plans of Plas Newydd and their benefactor Lady Frances Douglas secured them a Royal pension. Although there was always a considerable degree of controversy surrounding Butler and Ponsonby’s close relationship the couple were revered by the local community and admired internationally for what was described as their ‘Romantic Friendship’. ‘Their visitors and admirers… comprised not only royalty but soldiers, inventors, philanthropists, actors, artists, men of letters, and poets’ and included the Duke of Wellington, Wedgwood, Darwin, Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth and Shelley

(Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen, A Study in Romantic Friendship, London, 1971, pp. 9 - 10).

Other members of their literary circle like Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Prince Puckler-Muskau and Madame de Stael subsequently described their lifestyle in their memoirs.

Plas Newydd

Butler and Ponsonby transformed their medieval cottage into an elaborate Gothic fantasy, a cottage ornée, decorating it profusely with early carvings, panelling and Gothic windows glazed with antique stained glass panels salvaged from the ruins of nearby Valle Crucis Abbey. When Scott visited in August 1825, one of his party described: ‘the prints, the dogs, the cats, the miniatures, the cram of the cabinets, clocks, glass-cases, books, bijouterie, dragon-china, nodding mandarins, and whirligigs of every shape and hue – the house outside and in…covered with carved oak’ (C. Wainright,  The Romantic Interior: the British collector at home, 1750 - 1850, 1989, p. 273). ‘The library took center [sic] stage in the daily routine as a private sanctuary but also a site of calculated display that supplanted a traditional seat of masculine privilege and authority’ – libraries at this date were considered masculine retreats (Nicole Reynolds, ‘Cottage Industry: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Symbolic Capital of the “Cottage Ornee”’,The Eighteenth Century, Spring/Summer 2010, p. 219). Replete with finely bound books and curiosities of all kinds, including a lock of Mary Queen of Scots' hair, Madame de Genlis described the room in her memoirs: ‘An excellent library, composed of the best English, French, and Italian authors, affords them an inexhaustible source of diversified amusement and solid occupation; for reading is not truly profitable except when a person has time to read again’. (Madame de Genlis, ‘Souvenirs de Felicie L— ‘, [date unknown], published in J. Hinklin, The Ladies of Llangollen, as sketched by many hands; with notices of other objects of interest in that sweetest of vales, Chester, 1847, pp. 40 – 48). The ladies’ elaborate creation became as much a tourist attraction as was Horace Walpole’s Gothic Strawberry Hill House in Middlesex.

It is not known how this pair of bergères came to Plas Newydd. Given the ladies’ wide and eclectic circle, it is possible that they were a gift. ‘All statesmen and nobles paid tribute and homage at Plas Newydd, and none ventured a second visit without bringing a contribution of carved oak, which was a passport’ (Wainwright, op. Cit., pp. 272-3). The porch was decorated with carvings of the four evangelists, Latin inscriptions, and 17th-century lions donated by the Duke of Wellington (Mavor, op. Cit., pp. 215-7). Each room was filled with ‘rare and curious articles of bric-a-brac from all parts of the world, brought or sent to them by their many visitors (Helen Marshall North, Helen, ‘The Ladies of Llangollen’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. LIII, January 1897, pp. 424-427).

On the underside of one of the chairs there is a paper label inscribed ‘Ellerton’ in what is possibly Ponsonby’s handwriting, characterised by the thin, spidery penmanship and right-hand slope found in her household accounts. In 1851, Richard Ellerton (b. 1816), a Yorkshire-born army officer married local Llangollen girl, Janet Walker Wilkinson (b. 1825), and moved to his wife’s childhood home Llantysilio Hall, and later Plas yn Vivod, both of which were in the vicinity of Plas Newydd. Janet was a poet and literary talent, authoress of Dauntless, published in 1858, and Sketches and Legends amid the Mountains of North Wales, in Verse; Last Hours at Brymbo, published under a pseudonym in an 1866 collection called Scattered Flowers. Although Janet would have been a minor during the Ladies of Llangollen final years, they possibly knew her or her guardian, Alexander Reid. Notwithstanding, they certainly knew the Llantysilio estate, because earlier owners, Thomas Jones (fl. 1800-1816) and subsequently, John Harrison (1779-1844), were friends with whom they exchanged letters. However, to date, there is no evidence that Ellerton was in Llangollen before 1851. Possibly, the chairs were designated as a gift to the Ellerton family from one of the successive owners of Plas Newydd although this would dismiss the theory that the handwriting on the paper label is that of Ponsonby.

James Henry Duveen and the Gaskell Family

An ink inscription on one of the engravings offered here reads ‘Purchased at sale at “Plas Newydd” Per Duveen 1918. Also purchased the two Chippendale armchairs shown in the lithograph JBG’. ‘Duveen’ is almost certainly James Henry Duveen (b. 1873) nephew of one of the most influential art dealers of all time, Joel Joseph Duveen (known as Joseph) and his brother, Henry Joseph. James Henry Duveen worked for the family firm and was responsible for the family’s Liverpool gallery until 1906 when he moved to London, but following a family legal dispute, he set himself up as an independent dealer. Family tradition suggests James Henry Duveen acquired the chairs and lithographs at the 1918 sale on behalf of the Gaskell family – probably Colonel James Bellhouse Gaskell (1848-1925) of Roseleigh, Woolton, Liverpool; the inscription may be signed with his initials ‘JBG’. They remained in the family until sold in 2002. Gaskell was the second son of the wealthy industrialist and important art collector, Holbrook Gaskell (1813-1909), who was a client of Joseph Duveen (private correspondence). Holbrook Gaskell relied heavily on Duveen’s advice on his notable collection, which included J. M. W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, 1835, as well as John Constable’s Arundel Mill and Castle, 1837 (the latter now in the Toledo Museum of Art). In the early 1880s, James Bellhouse Gaskell was in negotiation with James Henry Duveen to buy the Jabach vases but wanted a written agreement that he need not pay for them until after his father died (J.H. Duveen, Secrets of an Art Dealer, 1937).

Interestingly, James Henry Duveen is recorded as living in the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, in 1918, possibly to negotiate the sale to the Gaskell family, before moving to Llangollen in 1919 to live at Plas Newydd. In June the same year, he purchased Plas Newydd but sold it six months later to the 7th Earl of Tankerville. Initially, James Henry Duveen had promised that he and his wife were going to move into Plas Newydd, and that ‘he had insured the various art objects which the council had entrusted to his care’ (Llangollen Advertiser, 4 July 1919). The press reported that prior to Duveen buying the house, the Council had been offered it for £8,000. It is possible that Duveen’s intention was to strip out the best contents including these chairs and sell the cottage at a profit having established that Plas Newydd could make money as a visitor attraction.

The Armchairs: James Wyatt and Gillows

The chairs are designed in the Gothic Revival style of the late 18th   and early 19th century associated with the architect-designer James Wyatt (1746-1813). In 1798, Stebbing Shaw noted it was Wyatt who ‘revived the ancient Gothic in all its rich ornaments, and fascinating charms’ (Stebbing Shaw, The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire, 1798). Between 1805-08, Wyatt’s designs for James Peachey, 1st Lord Selsey, at West Dean, Sussex, have been described as: ‘Wyatt increasingly bent his attention to the design of Gothic furniture… to match his Gothic interiors’ (J. Martin Robinson,James Wyatt; Architect to George III, New Haven and London, 2011, p. 159). From 1796, Wyatt held the Royal post of Surveyor General and Comptroller of the Office of Works. His Royal commissions in the Gothic style included, a large suite of furniture originally japanned black with parcel gilding (now gilded) consisting of 26 armchairs, 30 side chairs, 6 sofas, 5 tables, 6 screens and a pair of lantern tripods produced for the Speaker's House at the Palace of Westminster between 1802 and 1808 (RCIN 28728, 28729). Wyatt also designed a pair of Gothic library tables for the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, Wiltshire (Robinson, op. Cit., 2011, p. 159, fig. 158).

The exceptional quality of execution, choice of timber, and idiosyncratic carved detail of the bergère armchairs suggests these chairs were made by the eminent cabinet-making firm of Gillows of Lancaster & London, who produced Gothic pattern chairs throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Gillows’ earliest chair in this manner was produced in the 1760s after Thomas Chippendale’s ‘Hall Chair’, plate XVII in the 1762 Director, a pattern which the firm were still making for clients such as Lord Muncaster until the 1780s but with the additional comfort of a leather seat (Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman & Cabinet-Maker’s Director, 3rd edition, 1762, pl. XVII; S. Stuart, ‘Three Generations of Gothic Chairs by Gillows’, Furniture History, 1996, pp. 34-38).

Wyatt enjoyed a working relationship with Gillows from about 1772; the earliest documented example of Wyatt-designed furniture made by Gillows was a set of chairs supplied in July 1774 to Sir Thomas Egerton for the Dining Room at Heaton Hall, Lancashire (Robinson, op. Cit., p. 140).

In 1776, Robert Gillow moved from Lancaster to London to run the Oxford Street shop, and became friendly with the architect; in January 1779, Richard Gillow wrote to a Liverpool cabinet maker and timber merchant: ‘… Mr Wyatt lives in London & my brother & he are intimately acquainted’ (S. Stuart, ‘More Eighteenth-century Gillow Furniture discovered at Tatton Park’, Regional Furniture, 1998, p. 101).The discovery of the Noailles Album in 1947, part of Wyatt’s own working archive, which included his autograph designs, revealed that several of these designs were reproduced in the pattern books of Gillows but were not identified as the work of Wyatt (Robinson, op. Cit., p. 127). Wyatt does not appear to have objected to Gillows’ commercial reproduction of his designs, for example, the anthemion chair that Gillows made commercially from the 1770s. In summary, some hitherto anonymous designs from the Gillows’ workshop were in fact by Wyatt (Although a design for these chairs is not in the Gillows’ Estimate Sketch Books, the archive is incomplete, see: N. Goodison, J. Hardy, ‘Gillows at Tatton Park’, Furniture History, 1970, p. 38, f/n 5). The influence of the Wyatts, Lindsay Boynton argues, should not be underestimated. The ‘sober restraint and even austerity’ of Wyatt's designs led to the ‘severe geometric line and form... that is unquestionably the hallmark of the best Gillow furniture’ (L. Boynton, Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800, p. 20).

The ladies of Llangollen were friendly with Gillows’ clients; a design in the Gillows’ archive dated 1795 illustrates a library bookcase in very similar taste with crocket finials and quatrefoil mouldings, made for Daniel Leo of Llanerch Park, St Asaph, a mere twenty-five miles from Llangollen (97/1185). This underscores the possibility that Gillows made these chairs, which is further strengthened by the archival existence of related Gothic seat furniture commissioned by Daniel Leo (Boynton, op. Cit., archive references: 96/1017, 1021, 1119, 1121, 1135; 97/1185). Entries in Butler’s journal reveal that the ladies were on good terms with the Bishop of St Asaph, Jonathan Shipley, and his family - the Bishop of St Asaph’s son, William Davies Shipley (1745-1826), became Dean of St Asaph, and was known to have been a client of Gillows (Boynton, op. Cit., archive reference, 96/1107c). Lewis Baggott, another Bishop of St. Asaph from 1790 until 1802 was also a client of Gillows (Boynton, op. Cit., archive references, 95/600, 607, 609; 96/850, 855, 858, 863(2), 1081, 1083, 1086; 97/1162, 1164, 1167, 1168). Gillows also supplied a suite of six Gothic bookcases in 1805 to Captain Edward William Vaughan for his library at Rug, Corwen, Merioneth, North Wales for which the architects were Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Wyatt (S. Stuart, Gillows of Lancaster and London, 1730-1840, Woodbridge, 2008, p. 92, pl. 51-52). Another possible origin for the chairs is Brynbella, the 18th century house of Hester and Gabriel Piozzi, around twenty-five miles from Llangollen, furnished by Gillows for the enormous cost of £2,400 (Mrs Hester Lynch Piozzi, Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale)). Unfortunately much of the original Piozzi furniture by Gillows was sold off in 1821 by her adopted son and heir John Salusbury Piozzi Salusbury, the remaining contents sold Sotheby’s,  June 1994 (ed. E. Bloom, L. Bloom, Hester Lynch Piozzi: The Piozzi Letters 1811-1816, London, 1999, refers to unpaid bills totalling the huge sum of £1,700 from Gillows, in letters from Bath and Brynbella from 1813-15).